The 5th Robotic Project Competition and the Interactive Game Design Competition held by The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU)’s Department of Electronic and Information Engineering (EIE) on the PolyU campus yesterday (26 June) saw a vigorous display of students’ programming creativity and technical capability in robotic and interactive game designs.
This year, for the first time ever, four teams from the South China University of Technology, Guangzhou have taken part in the robotic project competition to vie with the 12 teams of EIE’s second-year students for the championship. To win the game, each team had to compose and programme an autonomous machine, the “TowerBuilder”, to search for and stack up randomly placed cylindrical objects in the game field within a time limit to form the highest tower.
In the interactive game design competition which took place earlier in May, each competing team used 3D graphics, live video and an advanced body motion tracking system to design a car racing game, in which the motion of the player was detected for controlling the robot car running on a racing track. Through the wireless video camera installed on the car, the player had a first person car racing experience as if driving inside the car. During the event, two winners of the competition demonstrated their creativity and design capability by racing against each other.
This is the fifth year in a row that EIE tried to stimulate students’ creativity and interest in robotics by means of competition. The fun-filled event this year has attracted more than 100 students from local universities and secondary schools attending as spectators. Furthermore, 30 staff and students of engineering from three mainland universities, namely, Xiamen University, Yunnan University and Hunan University also attended the competition as a highlight of their 4-day academic exchange tour at PolyU.
In addressing the participants and the audience, Prof. Michael C.K. Tse, Head of EIE, said, “The competitions, involving all the second-year students of the department, serve as a platform for our undergraduates to enhance their creativity, technical skills and problem-solving ability, and provide a good opportunity for them to share their learning experience with fellow classmates, counterparts from other universities and secondary school students. Furthermore, the event is a desirable occasion for secondary school students to have a taste of the study life at PolyU and experience the fun of engineering.”
The competitions are part of EIE’s innovative effort in providing satisfaction-driven learning experience to students through integrated projects, in which students can apply knowledge already learned in different subject areas to address a larger practical problem.
EIE offers full-time and part-time taught courses of four broad technical areas, namely, Multimedia and Signal Processing, Computer and Intelligent Systems, Circuits and Microelectronics, and Communications Engineering, at levels ranging from higher diploma to master’s degree.
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